


nothing's sacred, nothing's holy

by alderations



Series: reunions [1]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Emotionally Repressed, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Reunions, i read the wikipedia article on brass for this, medical stuff but like for a robot, mentions of sex but no actual sexual content, when u pull ur bf out of a sun but like no homo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:00:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26335282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: “Shouldn’t have to be as hot as the sun,” Raphaella corrects. “Just hot enough to melt. I can do that in the lab easily. It’s just… it won’t be, um, pleasant. Once he heals enough to feel it.”(Turns out, being in a star for a thousand years isn't easy to heal from, even for a Mechanism.)
Relationships: Drumbot Brian/Jonny d'Ville
Series: reunions [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1917655
Comments: 27
Kudos: 179
Collections: Brian Soup





	nothing's sacred, nothing's holy

**Author's Note:**

> cw's: body horror (melty drumbot), semi-accidental but necessary torture, brief discussion of sex but no actual sexual content

The hanged man no longer rusts.

His corrosion was stripped away centuries ago, within minutes of Fort Galfridian plunging into the sun, so all that’s left now is a stubborn blob of brass melting and reshaping and warping for so long that he can’t remember the form he used to inhabit. Some dull memory of sensation stays with him, but all he feels now is the heat that denies him enough of his existence to be aware of anything else. It doesn’t even hurt. But he can think, he can remember, even if it’s only in flashes when his mechanical brain reforms for long enough to allow him a thought, and  _ that  _ hurts. If that pain is what reminds him that he’s alive, though, he can’t complain.

Then, after a thousand years, something changes, and suddenly  _ everything  _ is pain.

“They’re—the fucking hull is  _ on fire,  _ I  _ told  _ you we shouldn’t have flown so close to a fucking star!”

“We had to! It was the only way—”

“I know that, and I don’t care. Aurora, can you  _ please  _ put them out before the whole ship goes up in flames?”

“It’ll—”

“I said  _ I don’t care!”  _ Nastya snarls, fixing Tim with a stony glare. “If our ship burns, we all get sucked into that sun and stay there until the damn thing burns out. Aurora listens to me anyway, so there.” Behind her, the airlock window is already fogged over with ice crystals, as Aurora apparently blasted the entire airlock with liquid nitrogen or something to that effect.

Tim and Raphaella stand in front of Nastya, both eyeing the airlock with adrenaline-fueled uncertainty. “Aurora, is the fire out?” Raphaella asks with a glance up at the ceiling.

In response, Aurora makes a pleasant  _ ding,  _ and the airlock door slides open. On the other side, captured in the moment as steaming ice sculptures, are Jonny and what, for now, remains of Drumbot Brian.

The last tatters of Jonny’s sunsuit hang off his smoldering form, while he focuses all his energy on growing his beard back exactly the way he likes it. Aside from his reddened skin and singed hair, he’s not in a terrible state; the sunsuit did its job, even if it didn’t survive the return trip, and once the temperature in the airlock has returned to something resembling normal, he shrugs it off and turns to Brian. The Drumbot, on the other hand, is… not himself.

His copper-filament hair is completely gone, as are the clothes he wore when he was strung up in Camelot. Though he’s still vaguely humanoid in shape, everything about him looks wrong—his face is missing, except for a misshapen bump where his nose seems to be struggling to reform; his limbs are all different lengths, melting into stringy globs where he should have hands and feet. As the other crew members watch, his name starts to appear on his chest as if etched by an invisible knife, only to freeze before it can finish. He stands, if it can be called that, silent and motionless in the middle of the airlock, brass shining, aorta barely poking out of the center of his chest as if to remind them all that this molten mess was, in some infinitesimal way, human.

Jonny screams.

The airlock breaks into chaos, as Jonny scrambles away from the cruel mockery of Brian’s form, and the other three rush forward to intervene. Raphaella and Nastya examine Brian, prodding at the glassy metal and arguing in subdued tones, while Tim gets a hold of Jonny and screams even louder until he can get Jonny to shut up for a moment. “It’s okay,” Tim shouts, knowing that he’s making shit up and it’s definitely  _ not  _ okay and Jonny knows it, but what the fuck else can he say? “It’s okay. You did it. He’s back.  _ Please  _ shut up now.”

Jonny shrieks a bit more, but his vocal cords are still recovering from being inside a literal sun, and it doesn’t take long for him to run out of air. “I fucked up,” he manages once the worst of his raw terror has already been expressed. “I did it wrong, we went to all that fucking trouble and he’s—he’s wrong, it’s my fault, I left him there too long and now he’s—”

“It’s not your fault. We’ve had this conversation, Jonny, remember? We’ll… figure it out! That’s what our scientists are for!” Tim is terrible at this, but he’s even more shaken by seeing Jonny so distraught, so he’s willing to play the part of a comforting friend for once. “Any thoughts, la Cognizi?”

“He’s… um…” Raphaella brushes a thumb over the half-finished carvings on Brian’s chest, then turns to Tim. “So if you get metal really hot, and then cool it really really  _ really  _ fast, it doesn’t have time to form a crystalline structure. So it makes glass. He’s—he cooled into glass.”

Before Tim can twist that into a half-assed reassurance, Jonny breaks free of his grasp and storms up to Raphaella. “Why the fuck isn’t his mechanism taking care of that, then? He’s Brian! He can handle a bit of glass!”

“I don’t know,” Raphaella responds, throwing her hands up defensively. “It obviously tried to, but something went… wrong. Like it’s frozen in there. I think… oh, lord.”

She looks up at Nastya, who gives her a sharp nod. “The metal needs to be tempered. Or re-melted, at the very least.”

“Like—like a  _ sword?”  _ Tim asks, incredulous. “Wait, we can’t just put him back in the sun. How do you plan on getting him  _ that  _ hot?”

“Shouldn’t have to be as hot as the sun,” Raphaella corrects. “Just hot enough to melt. I can do that in the lab easily. It’s just… it won’t be, um, pleasant. Once he heals enough to feel it.”

Jonny’s eyes go wide. “Can he feel—whatever  _ this  _ is?” He’s inching closer to Brian as if just clinging to him will make everything okay, but Nastya grabs his shoulder and holds him back. “I don’t—I don’t want him to—he’s—”

“We don’t exactly have a choice.” Nastya cuts him off before he can work himself into a spiral. “His mechanism is still trying to heal, so we just have to hope that it can do its job under the right conditions. Raphaella knows what she’s talking about.”

On Jonny’s other side, Tim peeks out through the exterior window of the airlock to make sure the ship is no longer on fire. “To the lab, then? How are we getting him there?”

“He’s not as heavy as he looks,” Jonny mumbles, though he doesn’t step forward when Tim and Raphaella each take one of Brian’s amorphous not-arms and heave him off the ground. “Mostly hollow.”

“Still—fucking—unwieldy,” Raphaella grunts under the Drumbot’s weight. “You two. Go find the temp chamber in my lab. Set to… ah, shit… 900 celsius? It’ll take a minute to warm up. It’s next to the walk-in freezer, Nastya, you know where it is.”

Nastya nods and drags Jonny off before he can protest anymore, though he shouts the entire way about how 900 degrees is entirely too hot and he can’t be expected to stand by and watch them melt Brian all over again. “Since when do you care?” she snaps at last, as they turn the corner and come face to face with the imposing steel doors of Raphaella’s lab. “You’ve shot the man more times than you can count. Did the sun melt your fucking personality?”

“Nastya, it was—you don’t understand,” Jonny pleads. “It was  _ awful  _ in there. It’s… it’s not even bright, once you get deep enough, just hot and  _ loud  _ and crushing and even with the stupid suit I died a bunch of times and he was  _ stuck in there  _ for a thousand years and it’s my fucking  _ fault  _ and—”

“Jonny.”

He snaps his mouth shut and glares up at her, as Nastya punches in the code to the lab and leads him toward the temp chamber. “Could you let me talk for once?”

“I let you talk all the time. Right now, it sounds like you’re actually experiencing guilt, perhaps for the first time in your life, and you’re having a crisis.”

By the time Jonny reconciles that thought in his head and stops staring mutely at the floor, Nastya has already turned on the temp chamber. “I thought it… I… it shouldn’t have taken us a thousand years.”

“But it did, and you have to live with that now.”

Jonny clenches his fists and stares up at her with bloodshot eyes, the effect of which is only amplified by his makeup. “Can you try  _ not  _ to mock me for a minute? Or at least wait until I’m not fresh out of a fucking star.”

“Not mocking,” Nastya protests, turning toward him but keeping her back to the machine so Jonny can’t mess with it. “There’s no point obsessing over what-ifs. We both know that. All you control is what you do now.”

They stare each other down for a long minute, while Jonny’s lip wobbles and Nastya starts to worry that the radiation actually broke him at last, before the door flies open again, letting the rest of the crew in. The Toy Soldier is carrying Brian bridal-style, because it doesn’t have muscles to feel the strain of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall metal man. “Where Am I Taking Him?” it asks, chipper but more focused than usual.

“That big box behind Nastya.” Raphaella trails after it, knowing that it’ll trudge right into the temp chamber if she doesn’t stop it in time. “What’s it at right now?”

Nastya studies the control panel for a minute, muttering to herself. “Ah… 200. It’s going to be a bit.”

“Well, we still need to put him  _ in  _ the chamber,” says Raphaella. “Here, help me get it open before it gets too hot.”

While Raphaella and Nastya pry open the door to the temp chamber and heft Brian inside, Marius sidles up to Jonny and throws an arm around his shoulders, expertly avoiding the wild punch that Jonny tosses in his direction. “Having an emotion, are we?”

“No. What are you talking about?”

Marius looks down at him, deadpan. “You’re crying.”

“Am not.”

“Are too. And even if you weren’t, it’s pretty obvious. I think you ought to cut yourself some slack, after you willingly launched yourself into a sun, like, a shit ton of times—”

“Marius. The only reason I’m not disemboweling you right now is that Raphaella would skin me alive. And that’s starting to feel like a consequence I’m willing to bear, so I suggest you shut your mouth before I change my mind.”

Apparently Marius is also keen to avoid Raphaella’s wrath, so he just nods and lets go of Jonny with a half-assed salute. In the temp chamber, which is now closed, Brian’s form starts to shimmer, his mechanism still fighting to alter his shape as he begins to soften. The rest of the crew watches the temperature rise by tens, their voices subdued and anxious. Raphaella fiddles with the control panel in an effort to speed the machine along, while Ashes tries to talk her into adding more fire to the equation. “I’d rather keep this more controlled,” Raphaella argues, elbowing them away from the controls.

“I  _ can  _ keep fire controlled. I just need—”

“It won’t be any faster. And if I see you so much as open a lighter in my lab, I will end you.”

Ivy stands on her tiptoes in front of the temp chamber, studying every detail of Brian’s body as if cataloguing it. “He’s melting,” she comments, snapping Raphaella and Ashes out of their argument.

He is, in fact, melting. The undefinable limbs have congealed back into one blob of pulsating metal, which writhes and swirls in conflict between the deteriorating heat and the interminable efforts of Brian’s mechanism. “Let him out,” Jonny growls, pushing Ivy aside and grabbing the handle to open the temp chamber. “He can heal now. Let him  _ out.” _

Before anyone can convince him otherwise, Jonny figures out the latch and swings the door open, letting out a blast of heat strong enough to knock them all back a few paces. Nothing like a sun, by any means, but Brian glows too bright to look at when he oozes out onto the floor of the lab, the door swinging shut behind him. It’s hard to tell whether any of his movements are intentional, but as the rest of the crew looks on, he starts to reshape—his head emerges, stretching from a neck that’s too thick and then too long and then half-sideways, as if his face is fighting to escape from the rest of him, while his legs manage to develop joints before they freeze again. This time, he gets fingers, but they’re all the wrong lengths, mismatched and misplaced, and even Aurora seems to hold her breath as the hands that once steered her so assuredly harden into unrecognizable lumps. He has a face, eyes and a nose and ears and a mouth that won’t close all the way, so his jaw hangs off-kilter as he starts to wail.

“Something’s wrong,” Nastya announces over the sound of Brian’s agony. He doesn’t bother to form words, but the sound doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. “Was it—was that not hot enough?”

Raphaella rolls her eyes and taps something on the control panel once again. “He cooled too fast. Again. Not fast enough to make metallic glass this time, but still too fast for his mechanism.”

Brian’s eyes dart between the crew at random, uncomprehending, while Tim grabs Jonny’s shoulder tight enough to make him wince and pulls him away before he can touch Brian and burn himself. “So we put him back in?”

“No,” Brian cries. “No, no, no, please, don’t—I can’t go back in, please—”

“He’s talking. That’s a good sign,” Ivy interrupts. “Some healing is happening, even if it’s slow.”

Still, his face looks like half of it is about to drip off of his head, while the other half is frozen in exaggerated terror.  _ “Please,  _ Ivy, listen to me, I can’t—”

“TS. Help me out.” Raphaella presses one last button, causing the door to the temp chamber to open again, and she and the Toy Soldier step forward, grabbing Brian’s arms—each hissing as their skin makes contact with the blazing metal—and frog-marching him back into the machine. He screams and begs the entire way, but they ignore him, intent only on melting him back down again. “This time, we do this  _ right,  _ d’Ville.”

Jonny can’t move. He’s done worse things to people millions of times—he’s watched plenty of mortal humans die in fires, burned at the stake and immolated and lit ablaze in their own homes. He’s killed  _ Brian  _ in worse ways. But watching his crew turn on one another without a word, forcing Brian back into a cheap mockery of the last thousand years of hell, makes his stomach go ice-cold. “Why did you do that,” he manages after a minute.

“She already told you,” Nastya insists. “He’s not going to repair himself unless we get the temperature right. Do you  _ want  _ Brian to be like that forever?”

It takes all of Jonny’s extremely limited willpower to keep from screaming. “I’m not a fucking idiot, Nastya! Why didn’t you  _ explain  _ that to him?”

“What does it matter?” asks Ashes. “He probably won’t remember any of this. Even if he did, he’d understand.”

“Why—what—what is wrong with all of you!” Jonny can feel the tears escaping the corners of his eyes now, and he continues to staunchly ignore them. “That doesn’t make it okay. You’re torturing him!”

Inside the temp chamber, Brian has melted down into pure metal once again, and Raphaella sets the machine to 800 degrees Celsius. “So? You love torture.”

“Not—not—any of you!”

That is patently false, and Jonny knows it as well as the rest of them. “Jonny,” Marius tries at last, reaching out to him but keeping his distance for once. “Are you sure you’re okay with… watching this?”

“Of course I am,” Jonny snarls.

Marius bites his lip and tries a different approach. “I think you’re in shock. You need to—”

“Shut  _ up!”  _ Jonny bats Marius’s gentle hands away, marching up to the front of the temp chamber. Inside, Brian’s face is swimming in and out of view on the surface of the metal blob. “Shut up. All of you. Just—do your stupid science thing, Raph, and get this over with.”

She raises her eyebrows, but doesn’t question him again, and the rest of the crew follows suit. After several millennia, they all know better than to try and talk Jonny down from this kind of mood—not even because he’ll murder them, but just because it only ever makes him worse. Raphaella lowers the temperature setting to 700, then watches the number tick lower every few seconds. “Ivy was right. It’s a good sign that he formed as much as he did when you let him out.”

“Shut up,” Jonny repeats.

Brian looks like a gingerbread man, his arms and legs mapped out but too vague to resemble an actual human. A sheen of rainbow covers his body. “Should I get a bed ready for him?” Marius asks, quiet enough to avoid angering Jonny again.

“I’d rather not have him recovering in here,” Raphaella grunts. “He likes to get… involved.”

Since there’s no real science happening in the medbay, Marius agrees and enlists Ashes to help him set up. As they leave, Raphaella turns the temp chamber down again, still keeping an eye on Jonny. Brian’s fingers are forming in the right places now, and his face has settled where it should be, above the shallow carving of his name and the softly sculpted metal making up the plane of his chest. At first, his features are blank, almost peaceful, but as the temperature ticks lower, awareness floods in. “Help,” he shouts, loud enough to be heard from outside.

Jonny flinches.

“Please,” Brian begs again. “Please,  _ stop.  _ It’s too hot, I can’t—please…”

  1. 620\. 610. He’s blubbering by now, still stuck in place but just able to move his mouth. “Is there no way to anesthetize him?” Ivy suggests.



“Not that I’ve ever found,” Nastya replies. She does far more work on Brian’s mechanical body than Marius or even Raphaella, but she’s not generally the anesthesia type regardless.

Raphaella turns the heat down again. “Make it stop,” Brian cries, finally lurching forward to flop against the door to the chamber. “It  _ hurts,  _ it hurts so fucking bad,  _ please  _ let me  _ out!” _

Outside, everyone is silent as the temperature ticks lower and lower, until Brian’s fist starts pounding against the door in a jerky, off-kilter rhythm. “I’m going in,” Jonny announces.

“You can’t let him out again, we’ll just have to—”

“That’s not what I said,” Jonny yells, cutting Raphaella off. “If he has to do this, so do I. It’s my fucking fault. I’m going in.”

Raphaella gapes at him in stunned silence as he wrenches the door open, pushes Brian back with his bare hands, and steps into the temp chamber. Within seconds, his hair singes off his head, and after that his skin starts to bubble, fat and muscle alike liquefying in the overwhelming heat as his mechanism fails to keep up with it. Brian reaches out for him, and by the time Jonny raises his hand to interlace their fingers, only bones remain.

  1. “Self-sacrificing bastard,” Nastya grumbles.



“Bet you two weeks of washing dishes he’s gonna write a song about this,” says Tim.

She purses her lips. “I’ll take that, actually. That would mean Jonny writing a song about his own emotions, and therefore acknowledging that they exist.”

At 300 degrees, Jonny’s mechanism starts to catch up with the heat, allowing his charred flesh to stick to his bones for longer and longer as it struggles to weave itself back into place. Brian sobs silently, but makes no effort to escape. “Shouldn’t be too bad for much longer,” Raphaella says, putting words to the uncomfortable guilt stirring all around them. “Brian looks almost like himself.”

Even his hair is starting to grow back now, cascading from his head in shiny ringlets that brush his shoulders by the time Raphaella turns the machine down to 200. Brian tips his head back and stares at the ceiling of the chamber, until Jonny steps closer to him and rests a hand on his cheek. “If they get melted into each other like a gross gay repression amalgam, we’re leaving them like that,” Nastya insists.

“Seconded,” Raphaella agrees.

Brian appears to be crying, though it’s hard to tell when his tears evaporate before they can fall halfway down his face. “I Am Certainly Glad To See My Fellow Machine Again,” the Toy Soldier declares apropos of nothing. Tim pats it on the shoulder.

As the chamber falls to 100 Celsius, Raphaella starts decreasing the temperature in increments of 10, just to be extra certain that Brian doesn’t cool too fast, and also for dramatic effect. No one else has to know that part. Brian wobbles on his feet, which means that he’s flexible enough to be unsteady, and is therefore a good thing. “Are you ready to catch them, Nastya?” asks Raphaella, realizing that Jonny will probably be barrelling out at full speed just to get away from his feelings, if nothing else.

“Mhm.”

The machine ticks down from 50, 40, 30, and finally, at room temperature, Raphaella turns it off. “Alright. You can open it.”

Nastya glances back at Tim, who begrudgingly joins her in front of the door and backs her up while she slides open the latch. As predicted, Jonny lurches out of the chamber and straight into Tim’s iron grip, while Nastya has to step inside to help Brian out. He’s conscious and walking on his own, but he doesn’t respond to her soft attempts at conversation, nor does he notice when she waves a hand in front of his face. Meanwhile, Jonny is fighting Tim tooth and nail. “What the  _ fuck  _ do you want now? We’re done here. He’s fine. Let go of me!”

“I’m—hng—mostly making sure you don’t make a mess of Raph’s workshop,” Tim hisses. “Also a bit concerned that the radiation cooked your brain after all these years.”

“My brain is  _ fine!  _ Let go of me.”

After steering him in the direction of the door, Tim does just that, then watches Jonny disappear as fast as if he’d teleported away. “There’s at least a sixty percent chance that he’ll be back within an hour,” Ivy supplies.

“I might need someone to distract him, in that case,” Nastya responds. She’s supporting Brian with an arm around his back now, and though he leans on her, he still seems unaware of her presence. “I guess I’m going to go kick Marius out of his own medbay, because I don’t trust him within a mile of Brian’s circuitry.”

The Toy Soldier opens the door for her with a helpful salute, but no one else follows her, staring instead at the inside of the temp chamber, where a small puddle of something mysteriously greasy coats the floor. After Nastya and Brian leave, Tim shakes his head hard enough to make a mess of his hair. “Well, that was fucking disturbing.”

“Says Mister Show Them All the Colors Of Their Entrails On the Floor,” Raphaella counters.

“I meant Jonny doing something… altruistic.”

Ivy smirks. “That’s fair.”

Brian doesn’t exactly sleep, but he can only describe what’s happening to him right now as waking up.

For the first time in a thousand years, his senses—all of them—come back to him. He smells disinfectant first, which is unusual for his haphazard crewmates, but they have needs for it every once in a while. That can be dismissed. Something in his mouth tastes metallic, unsurprisingly. He hears humming, distant and subdued, that takes the shape of a song over several minutes as he lies still and focuses on the melody. The voice is familiar, though not one he’s used to hearing in song. When he manages to open his eyes at last, the room is blurry for a minute—but it’s a room, and that’s an improvement. He blinks. He can blink, which is good. All at once, he’s aware that he can  _ feel,  _ that he knows the crinkle of a shitty plastic mattress under his back and starchy sheets on top of his torso, that a helpful metric in his mechanical brain tells him the room is twenty-three degrees Celsius. Even though his body is stiff and alien and uncomfortable, he  _ has  _ one. That thought is enough to make his breath catch in his chest.

To his relief, it doesn’t take too much effort to turn his head toward the humming. Next to him, Nastya sits in an office chair, one knee drawn up to her chest and her chin resting on her hand. She’s leaned in close to a small computer screen, apparently playing chess against the Aurora and singing to herself. “Nas…?” he tries, voice softer than he means for it to be.

She sits upright and stops singing all at once. “You’re awake.”

“Hm,” is all Brian can get out.

Rising from the chair, Nastya scans his face with a shrewdness that only she can manage. “How do you feel?”

Brian raises his eyebrows, because that’s a loaded question if he ever heard one. “Quiet,” he says after a moment of contemplation.

“Quiet?”

“Like… I know what’s going on around me, and I think I should be overwhelmed, but it’s just so quiet instead.”

As if on cue, something crashes in the next room over, and then Jonny is standing in the doorway, hair flying in every direction and eyes wild. “He’s awake? Why didn’t you tell me he was awake?”

“He’s been awake for thirty seconds,” Nastya shoots back, defensive.

Jonny scowls. “That’s thirty seconds too long!” Before Brian can even open his mouth, Jonny is striding across the room toward him, looking hell-bent on  _ something  _ that makes Brian recoil a bit out of fear. Not that he’s usually afraid of Jonny, but things have… changed, in some ways. “Why are you looking at me like that,” Jonny demands once he gets closer to Brian’s bed and stops with his fists clenched and his shoulders tight.

“Hi, Jonny,” Brian offers. His voice comes out even softer now than when he was talking to Nastya, because he is a painfully obvious man.

To his immense surprise, Jonny looks like he’s about to cry. “Hi. You, uh. You were stuck in a sun.”

“Yep.”

“I’m… um. We. Well. We’re, uh, sorry about that.”

Brian opens his mouth to reassure him, but nothing comes out, and the silence stretches on and on until Jonny can no longer meet his eyes. Thankfully, Nastya saves him from the incredible awkwardness. “I’m going to do a brief check-up on your robotics, if that’s alright with you,” she says, coming to stand between him and Jonny in a way that she probably thinks is subtle. “We had some… trouble getting your mechanism to heal properly, so I want to make sure that you’re going to be okay from now on.”

“Of course,” Brian responds, voice meek.

While Nastya helps him to his feet and starts examining him, Jonny takes her seat in front of the computer and takes over her chess game. Aurora beats him in less than a minute. Nastya pretends not to hear him cursing. “Do you mind if I shine a light in your eyes?”

“Nope.”

He can feel his mechanical pupils contract when she does just that. “Raise your left arm for me?”

They go on like that for several minutes, in some weird mockery of a routine physical that makes Brian feel strangely human for once. Nastya’s hands are gentle when she has to touch him, and she helps him back onto the bed when his knees start to shake under him. It’s strange for his body to show that kind of fatigue, but not unheard of, so he doesn’t say anything about it. Once she’s satisfied that he’s not going to fall apart any second, Nastya stands up again with her hands on her hips. “You look good, all shiny new brass. I’m almost jealous.”

“Don’t be,” he replies earnestly.

Nastya smiles down at him, which is an unusual sight but very much a welcome one. “I’ll, er, give you two some time alone, then. Let Aurora know if you need anything? From me or her.”

When he nods, Nastya turns on her heel and leaves the medbay, closing the door softly behind herself. Brian is suddenly very glad that his body is so rigid, so Jonny can’t see him taking a  _ very  _ deep breath. “So. I was stuck in a sun?”

Jonny is still sitting in the office chair, but now he’s holding a hat that wasn’t there before Nastya interrupted them. It’s one of Brian’s old hats, black felt with brass goggles on top and a rose—but not one that he’s seen before; this one is a soft purplish color on the outside, fading to golden-tan on the inner petals. It’s also  _ enormous,  _ barely balancing on the brim of the hat, and Brian can smell it from several feet away. “I, um, I got you a… gift?” Jonny mumbles. “The rose—the variety, I guess—it’s called ‘Distant Drums’ and I thought that was. Y’know. Fitting.”

“Did you rob a Space Lowe’s for me?”

“I robbed a botanical garden!” Jonny declares, as if that’s somehow better. “A while ago, actually. I have the whole bush in the greenhouse, and some others. I just thought this one was, like, a nice…  _ pow.”  _ He mimes fireworks with his hands, then thrusts the hat toward Brian. “Here, you look weird without it.”

Brian takes the hat but doesn’t put it on, instead studying the thick layers of petals in the center of the rose. “You were thinking of me, then.”

“Yeah. Hard not to, when our  _ lovely  _ starship is doing whatever the fuck she feels like doing all the damn time.”

The wall closest to him makes a soft hydraulic hiss, which Jonny doesn’t seem to notice, but Brian knows that Aurora is attempting to reprimand him. “But you didn’t come to get me?”

He forces himself to look up at Jonny, to meet his eyes, but he’s surprised to find them red-rimmed and tired. “I did, Brian. I did. Twenty-seven times, in fact, but every time I’d die within seconds and wake up after the sun just spat me back out. I couldn’t get to you, no matter what I tried, and Nastya kept saying the ship was going to burn up, and I was starting to lose it, and nothing  _ worked  _ until we finally built that stupid sunsuit a few years ago. And by then we were on the far side of the fucking galaxy, because you know how things—how everything goes, with us, and…” He’s rambling by now, his eyes wet and his voice cracking, and Brian has  _ never  _ seen him like this. It’s terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, to see even the slightest hint of evidence that Jonny really cares for him this much. “I’m sorry. I’m  _ really  _ fucking sorry. I felt what it was like in there, and I—I can’t—I… can’t.”

Brian takes another deep breath, studying every inch of Jonny’s face before he responds. “It’s okay.”

“I—wait, what?”

“It’s okay,” Brian repeats. “Yes, it was awful, but most of the time I wasn’t aware of it at all. Honestly, I thought you were all going to wait until that star burned out on its own. I… didn’t think I was worth the effort. And I, um… I know what you did. In Raphaella’s lab. I can remember all of… that.”

Shock flashes across Jonny’s face for a fraction of a second, before he crosses his arms and rolls his eyes to shake it off. “It’s one hell of a story. I wouldn’t just let that opportunity pass untouched.”

Brian wants to smile at that, but his face isn’t willing to put in that much effort. “Of course.”

As always, Jonny is desperate to change the topic away from anything that implicates him as having human feelings, so he looks down at Brian’s bare chest instead and decides to comment on that. “Do you want some clothes? I brought you a change, in case you woke up and, y’know, wanted them.”

“I’m alright,” Brian assures him. He’s wearing a threadbare pair of boxers that he thinks once belonged to Marius, as he discovered when he first got out of bed, so nothing too sensitive is exposed. “I would… um. I haven’t really been touched in a thousand years?”

Jonny’s eyes snap back up to his. “Nastya was just touching you.”

“I’m not talking about Nastya.”

It takes a few seconds for his meaning to click, but then Jonny’s eyes widen and he shuffles closer to the bed. He opens his mouth to ask something, but before he can say a word, Brian opens his arms and beckons him with a tilt of his head, and Jonny crawls onto the bed and flops down on top of Brian’s torso with an unreserved sigh. His weight isn’t nearly enough to strain Brian’s metal body, but the pressure is grounding and Jonny is warm and when Brian wraps his arms around him and pulls him even closer, Jonny goes without protest. “‘M sorry,” he repeats.

“I deserved it,” Brian whispers.

Jonny frowns. “No, don’t—”

“I did. I deserved every minute of it. There were  _ thousands  _ of people on that station, Jonny, and they all plunged into the fucking sun with me. All because I wouldn’t misgender a kid! And— _ fuck,  _ Mordred, he… he didn’t deserve all of that, he was a good person for once in this godforsaken universe, he—he…” Brian chokes himself off with a sob, burying his face in Jonny’s shoulder. “Th-they all f-f-fucking died, Jonny, and it’s all m-my fault.”

He can feel Jonny’s head turn, probably trying to look for his switch, but apparently Jonny thinks better of it, which Brian appreciates. He can’t handle that thought right now. “I seriously doubt that the fate of this entire station depended on one pronoun.”

“It  _ did!”  _ Brian grasps Jonny’s shirt and clings to him with immovable hands. “If I had just—if Arthur had b-believed me, if I could’ve—they were s-so close, Jonny. It would’ve been okay.”

“If any one of us was ever involved, you know that’s not the case. And I’m not saying that you messed things up, Brian, I’m just saying that we’re cosmically fucking magnetized to tragedy.”

Brian just shakes his head, smearing artificial tears across the front of Jonny’s shirt. “I felt so helpless,” he admits at last, his voice small and wavering.

“That tends to be the case, when one is strung up by the foot.”

This only makes Brian cry harder, which doesn’t surprise Jonny. He just holds on, arms warm against the unnaturally smooth curves of Brian’s shoulders, as the metal man weeps into the crook of his neck until he barely has the energy to make a sound. Jonny’s close to falling asleep by the time Brian finally calms down, but he perks up at the feeling of Brian’s hand brushing the nape of his neck. “Do you need something?”

Brian’s fingers curl in his hair and tug backward until Jonny pushes himself up to look down at Brian’s face. Then Brian lets go, leaving Jonny’s head to fall directly onto his own, because Jonny is too stubborn to hold his head up unless he decides to do so of his own accord. Still, he melts against Brian when their mouths meet at last. Out of all the feelings Brian has rediscovered in the last hour or so, nothing compares to lips touching his, much less Jonny’s tongue licking into his mouth and tangling with his own. He pulls back after a moment, knowing from experience that Jonny will just keep kissing him until he passes out. “Y’know, you could’ve just  _ asked  _ for a kiss instead of trying to concuss me,” Jonny complains.

Brian can’t help but laugh, watery and weak though it is. “Sure. Next time.”

“Missed your stupid smile,” grumbles Jonny.

That may as well be an admission of true and undying love, coming from Jonny, and Brian strokes one hand down his side to toy with the waistband of his pants in lieu of a response. Jonny studies his face for a second, then gathers that hand with his own and brings it to his mouth, kissing each of Brian’s knuckles one by one. “Something wrong?” Brian asks, because Jonny is almost never the type to not actively seek out sex.

“You’re crying again.”

He’s right, though Brian only feels the tears on his face now that Jonny has pointed them out. “Ah. I’m… very overwhelmed, I guess.”

“Makes sense,” Jonny says. “Tomorrow. Trust me, I’ve  _ really  _ missed, um, that aspect of our relationship, but not enough to make you cry about it.”

Brian bites his lip, looking around the medbay. “And Marius would kill us.”

“And Marius would kill us.”

They lapse into silence again, before Jonny lets his head fall back onto Brian’s chest and slides off of him, onto the bed. Brian misses the weight of him, but he doesn’t mind having more room to curl himself around Jonny and hold him close. “Stay here with me?” he asks, taken aback by the vulnerability in his own voice.

“What are you gonna do, sleep?”

Brian laughs, though it’s more a short exhale than anything else. “I can certainly try.”

Next to him, Jonny shifts until their legs are interlaced and he can slot his head under Brian’s chin. “Then I’ll stay. I’m already half-asleep anyway.”

The lights shut off overhead, and Brian flashes Aurora a silent thumbs-up in thanks. “Love you, Jonny.”

“Don’t make me change my mind, Drumbot.”

Brian just laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> once upon a time I thought "what if when Brian came out of the sun, it was like when you get frostbite really bad and you have to put it in cold water instead of hot water and warm it up Slowly or else it necroses or something" which is apparently par for the course when it comes to me and my ability to just throw random unrelated bits of science and medicine at each other until I form an angsty enough idea. This is absolutely not how you treat burns or heatstroke or anything, but metal WILL warp and get fucked up if it cools really fast. I read physics for this fic. PHYSICS. So if it's wildly unrealistic (which it is, I know), just... keep in mind that I, a 23 year old with a degree in biology, still have no fucking clue what Newton's laws mean. I push a wall and it pushes me back?? Sounds fake but okay. It doesn't really make any sense in-canon for Brian to even be able to melt, but it's for the angst. It's About The Body Horror Folks.
> 
> anyway... I'm very emotional about these guys and their mismatched hearts? What's up with that. Awfully gay of them. There will probably be an nsfw epilogue to this, because I'm working a lot this week and daydreaming about fic is how I make it through work, so there you have it.
> 
> Comments...............really solidify my melty drumbot. like, emotionally. I'm not great at replying to them but they really do mean the world to me. I am on tumblr @alderations and twitter @alderwrites. Title is from "Awful" by Empress Of, big big two of hearts vibes, it's on my new two of hearts playlist which is just "playlist for when you're in love but also your self-worth is CATACLYSMICALLY bad." thanks for reading everybody take care of yourselves.
> 
> ETA the [roses!!!](https://www.heirloomroses.com/distant-drums.html) The rose Jonny stole for Brian!!! I found it on a list of rare rose varieties lol and it's very pretty.


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